The words novel and romance share a rich history. While used
interchangeably during the eighteenth century to denote a long prose narrative,
the former came to denote a realistic narrative of ordinary, everyday life, and
the latter a narrative ofheroic adventures and questingknights (such as the chivalric
romances satirized by Don Quixote) or aristocratic protagonists
performing extraordinary feats while caught up in great love affairs (such as
the historical romances satirized by The Female Quixote). All this is
well known. But for all the ostensible differences between the two types of
narrative, realist novels can and do regularly feature romance discourse, as my
students noticed in a course on theBritish Novel (1700-1900) that I taught recently. This
apparent anomaly became a recurring motif in our ongoing conversation on
narration and narrative. (We talked, for instance, about the ways in which
realistwriters
reworked conventions of the romance mode, as whensome of the "romantic
Turns" of Lennox's Arabella in The Female Quixote become a means of
female agency for her protagonist; it was a pleasure to see my students make
these sorts of connections.) During that semester I remember thinking at one
point that my students, several of whom major in journalism, might be
fascinated by the intercourse of journalism and fiction, provided of course that I could
helpthem see
how certain novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries trafficked in
the discourse ofthe
journalism of their time, freely importing and/or reworking its conventions. My
thinking was inspired by what I knew of the parallels between Defoe's novels
and hiswork as
an editor of a partisan newspaper, the Review, as well as bythe "news/novels matrix"
that Lennard Davis traces in his Factual Fictions (Columbia, 1983), which I was using
in the course (along with Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel [1957; reissued U of California,
2001]) as a source for student presentations. In his new book on fiction and
journalism, Doug Underwood follows a long line of scholars including Watt,
Davis, and others who have traced the connectionsbetween fiction and journalism. As
Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, Underwood acknowledges this lineage
in a book that, as he says, straddles the border of English Studies and Journalism. Acapacious
interdisciplinary primer of "journalist-literary figures" from the
eighteenth century to the present day, this book thoroughly synthesizes
scholarship-drawn alike from English Studies and Journalism-onthe myriad writers who have worked
as both journalists and novelists. ThoughUnderwood's strongly biographical emphasis may leave
specialists in literaturefeeling undernourished, students and general readers will
find much to admire about the book.

Early on, Underwood notes that scholars of literatureand scholars ofjournalism frequently treat
journalistic-literary figures from incompatible perspectives. Less mindful than
literature scholars of the postmodern condition, journalism scholars are less
inclined to see the gap between any fact/phenomenon and what purports to
represent it:signs,
language, or interpretation (12).Underwood strives for a more "hybrid form of
scholarship that mirrors that hybrid nature of much journalistically influenced
literature" (13), and to sidestep potential conflicts over critical or
theoretical terminology,he shrewdly employs such terms as "journalist-literary
figure" and "journalistic literature." His introduction makes
this promise:

I will be advancing
three major conclusions from my reading of the journalist-literary figures that
I have identified as having crucially influenced the literary heritage in the
US and the British Isles. First, I will be contending that journalists and
journalistic values have played critically important roles in the creation of
the British and American literary canon, and I will describe the values and the
experiences these writers gained from journalism and show that they played a
vital part in the development of their literary visions. Second, I will be
arguing that the field of journalism deserves more recognition for its
contribution to the literary tradition in the broadest of contexts. Third, I
will be examining why journalism's influence upon the fictional and literary
writing tradition is not better understood, and why it is that many of these
well-known journalist-literary figures themselves didn't always acknowledge
their debt to the profession that helped to shape their writing so powerfully.
(13-14)

In doing all of this, Underwood puts
more stress on "biographical details" than literary specialists in
the English novel have recently done. Biography, he contends, can help to
explain the writer's historical moment, and as we have learned from scholars
working in Media Studies and American studies,each of these moments has its unique
cultural and sociological characteristics. Underwood finds biography
particularly helpful to those engaged in discovering "the influence that
journalism has had upon these writers' lives-in finding similarities in their
careers and their works of art, in examining how the experiences they shared in
journalism influenced their views of literary and journalistic developments,
and in noting the connections between their literary viewpoints and the
cultural currents of their age" (14). Coveringseveral "epochs" over the
course of three centuries, Underwood tracksthe rise of the novel in the
eighteenthcentury,
the "Age of Periodicals" in the early nineteenth century, the
"heyday" of literary realism followed by literary naturalism (from
the mid-nineteenth to the early twentiethcenturies), the "Age of Newspapers" (from
the late nineteenth century through World War I), the decades spanning the
1920s-1940s (typified by cosmopolitan/disillusioned/expatriate writers in the
US or abroad), and the rise of the "new journalism" in 1960s and
1970s. Underwood documents these periods in a valuable appendix of over 300
significant journalist-literary figures.

His major conclusions about the
various epochs he defines turn upon the work of diverse scholars in English
Studies and Journalism. Working chiefly as "a synthesizer and
interpreter" in order to make specialized scholarship along with biography
available to broader audiences (28), he deftly explains the intersections of
journalism and literature in the lives of major journalistic-literary figures
ranging from Defoe and Dickens to Didion (including figures whose experience in
journalism is seldom remarked upon, too, such as Wallace Stevens). The result
is an engaging collection of cameos. In his treatment of Dickens, for instance,
Underwood skillfully blends extant scholarship and biographical detail to show
how Dickens' early political reporting and sketch work for London periodicals
nurtured the investigative and entrepreneurial skills that drove Dickens's
literary career. His reporting experience not only gave him the material for
some of his most memorable characters but also bred the skills with which he
made his novels thrive-through serial plotting and publication (65-68). Not
surprisingly, given Underwood's "synthetic" approach to his task, he
is most informative with writers who have been studied extensively.

Nevertheless,Underwood's
strongly biographical method is a mixed blessing that sometimes leads to
overgeneralization, if not oversight. In his account of Fielding, for instance,
Underwood adroitly shows how Fielding honed his satirical skills in moving from
drama through journalism to fiction. But he overstates his case when he claims
that Fielding's novels were an "outgrowth" of his time as a partisan
journalist, that "the years he spent perfecting his style as an essayist,
polemicist, and moral critic helped pave the way for the authorial voice of his
novels" (54-55). Though Underwood aptly states that "[Fielding] saw
his novels, his plays, and his anonymously written political journalism as
seamlessly linked" (55), hefails in the end to reconcile Fielding's formative
experiences in the theatre with the novelist's "authorial voice."
Fielding's beginnings as a dramatist mark the beginning of a satirical bent
that persists throughout his writingcareer. If anything, Fielding's time in the theatre inflects
the art of his fiction, where-as George Eliot's narrator observes in Middlemarch-"he seems to bring his
arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine
English" (141), staging the follies, quirks, and vices of his characters
accordingly. Fielding brings to his novels the mind of a satirical playwright.
In any event,putting
his novels into play with his contributions to The Champion (ed. W.B. Coley, Wesleyan, 2003)
would have strengthened the case for the sort of "authorial voice"
that Underwood ascribes to Fielding. Likewise,Underwood's cameo of Eliot hardly
probes her journalistic experience. Itsimply sketches the work she did as an editor and
journalist-in association with such men as John Chapman and George Henry
Lewes-before re-inventing herself as a novelist. How did her editing and
writing for the Westminster Review or the Leader shape her literary vision? Neglect of questionssuch as this expose the limits of
Underwood's biographical method.

In supplementing his syntheses of
scholarship with biographical detail rather thanclose reading of primary texts,
Underwood aims for an audience beyond specialists in literature, and anyone
with a casual interest in the connections between fiction and journalism will
find his book useful and informative. At his best, moreover, he juxtaposes
works of fiction with relevant journalistic pieces in order to show how the
fiction grew out of journalistic experience. To show, for instance, how Hemingway's fictive prose
trades in some of the material and verbal fluency that he developed as a
journalist, Underwood reads a bullfightpassage from The Sun Also Rises (1926) beside an essay titled
"Pamplona in July" (1923) written for the Toronto Star magazine. While "one can see
the incipient outline of the fictional version in the original Star article," he writes, "the
novel's prose has a finer, more flowing verisimilitude, not the least because
Hemingway's writing is more confident and refined-and because, it is clear, he
was reaching for a higher literary effect in the writing of his fictional
version" (146-48). Though his critical terms here are rather generalized,Underwood's
comparativereading
of specific texts tells us more about the relation between journalism and
literature than his biographical sketches do.

That said, Underwood's book is
timely. Its capacious sweep, its systematic synthesizing of secondary
scholarship, and its valuable appendix make the book useful if not vital. Non-specialist
readers in particular will find much to like about it.Underwood's anecdotal flair, coupled
with his conversational prose style, is congenial and informative.

Jack Vespa is Lecturer in English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln.